3. Goethe as the Father of Spiritual Research

The development of the powers and abilities that lie dormant in human beings, of meditative thinking that leads into the spiritual world, is based on nothing other than the lively pursuit of the inner metamorphoses of the soul's powers. On the one hand, those who wish to become spiritual researchers attempt to shape their imagination and perception in such a way that they continually introduce the will, which otherwise only slumbers in perception and imagination, into this perception and imagination, so that they deliberately call to the soul what otherwise appears as involuntary imagination. In this way, what is otherwise pale thinking or forced perception is transformed into imagination, into pictorial vision. For the spiritual can only be seen pictorially. The will and the feelings, which can otherwise be imagined but not recognized in their actual essence, are transformed by the meditative life itself, so that they become imaginative life, perceptive life.